Logging estimate - an NSV

lynn_glenmont

So, a while back a new pizza place opened near my office that operates on what I think of as the "Chipotle" model -- you choose a base (white or whole grain pizza dough, or they also do salads), move down the line and choose sauce(s), fresh mozzarella or shredded three-cheese blend, veggies, proteins, then they run it through the oven, and then you can choose other "finishing" toppings (flavored oils, vinegars, olives, parmesan, feta or goat cheese, etc.).

I created an MFP "my meal" with entries for all the various toppings and different cheeses and what not, but this place doesn't have online nutrition information, and I don't keep a scale at work, so all of my entries are guesstimates, generally using USDA-based entries for the ingredients and guessing the weight.

The biggest guess was the pizza dough, as I don't make pizza from scratch at home, but I do make bread, so I have some idea of what dough weighs and what that weight looks like in terms of volume after it's cooked, but a loaf is hard to compare visually to a flat crust. So, I felt least confident about this, and I figured the dough easily accounts for half the calories, even with fatty meats on the pizza, so it was a bad place to be making my biggest guess. I found an entry for Trader Joe's frozen pizza dough that had a lot of confirmations and that seemed reasonable and gave its serving size by weight, eye-balled my pizza crust, and decided it was probably about 8 oz. (half a pound).

Depending on what I put on my pizza, my estimates have generally ranged from 800 to a little over 1000 calories.

So, today I went to get a pizza, and I grabbed the little clipboard that has what is ostensibly an ordering form clipped to it (although I don't remember ever seeing anybody fill one out -- people just tell the assembly line workers what they want). I see that all of the ingredients now have calories listed. So I start adding up in my head everything I'm getting on my pizza, and it comes to a little over 900 calories. So, OK, it's in the range of what I've been estimating.

These order forms are pretty thick paper stock (maybe one reason people don't treat them as "disposable" order forms), so I didn't feel comfortable carrying one away with me, but when I got back to the office I remembered the numbers for most of the ingredients, and found that my estimates for most things were pretty close to what the order form said. Oddly, the one number I couldn't remember was the biggest one -- the dough. But I had all the other numbers and I remembered the total, so I did a little subtraction and found that the estimate I had been using was only 6% off (30 calories off on a 500-calorie crust).

I did a mental happy dance. Yes, I am nerdy enough to get a big kick out of validating my eyeballing and calorie estimating skills.

L1zardQueen

Yep, that's a good skill to have. Awesome!